


Overexposure

by Artemis_Crimson



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Gore, HAHAHA SELF INSERT FIC BECAUSE FUCK YOU, also because the lovely girlfriend is encouraging and indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-01 10:22:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13996227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artemis_Crimson/pseuds/Artemis_Crimson
Summary: In which it might have been better to stay alone.





	Overexposure

If one where to listen closely to the vents a frantic mantra could be heard echoing through them.  
“Shit shit shit shit what the shit.”  
Clara was edging as quickly as she could through the weirdly large air vents that circled mount massive considering she was blind. She came up to an opening that let out into an seemingly empty room, she sucked in a deep breath before dropping down, immediately raising her camera to continue recording this shitshow.

A literal fucking shitshow. She was in the sewers being chased by a giant piggy man missing part of his forehead. She drained and ran and hide in tiny poop filled tunnels and it’d stopped stinking which was a really really bad sign. She finally came to a great black abyss of a room, filled up to her thighs with stagnant water. Just before she leaped into it she heard the telltale clinking of chains that meant Walker was fucking around where she needed to go again. Instead of a reckless leap she slipped in, earlier she would have shuddered in disgust at the weirdly tepid liquid soaking even further into her jeans but at this point she couldn’t care. After slowly circling the cistern and finding nothing, she started from the entrance and tried her damndest to walk in a straight line. After a minute she could see a broken staircase and in her excitement she made a noise.  
...The clinking noise was racing towards her and she took off running and she was so close when a massive blow to her back sent her flying. She wasn’t airborne for long, skidding farther away on algae covered brick, in the panicked second it took to collect herself he’d almost made it halfway there. She saw the broken stairs and raced up the stubs as quickly as she could, he tried to follow but weakened by her and with his own weight the stairs snapped, Clara having already made the leap from the platform up to the ladder in the tiny hole that lead to light disappeared to a brief moment of safety.

More running from deranged murderous rape-y men. Joy. She slammed door after door behind her as the hoard picked up speed and members with each room, shoving metal crates with ease that bought her a few precious moments before their combined might could topple them. The last metal box was moved into place before she realized this was a dead end, a literal dead end if she didn’t find some way out. If it was just one she could fight them off but there was a mob and they’d surround her and a voice was calling her. A voice was calling from the dumb waiter that she’d missed and oh lord she didn’t trust it but in this case better the evil you don’t know. She dove into the cramped box just as the door broke in. Struggle to breathe in the darkness and oh no he was naked the man who’s been talking was shirtless and he was winding up and-

 

...  
Clara wakes up in a wheelchair, vision blurring. She’s strapped to it, there’s a door, the voice is mocking her as she fades right out again. She’s in a bathroom now, a piss stained bathroom decorated with medical tools and grime. The man is making amicable sounding chatter to himself, setting up her camera to record her, before he walks over and removes a ridiculously oversized pair of shears from a fucking urinal.  
The speed is the only mercy.  
He takes a finger from each hand, ring and pointer gone in two quick motions. The pain is blinding burning boiling and as soon as he steps out, hearing a fuss in the distance she rips free from the bonds. She falls on her hands and knees and stares helplessly ahead at the red. At the soft yellow fat that pulsed with each sob of a breath, at the strands of loose useless muscle and the exposed bone before finally vomiting on the floor.  
Deep breath in.  
Deep breath out.  
Wipe the bile from her face on her sleeve, grab her camera from the sink it was balanced on and run. Run like hell, dodge the demented excuse for a surgeon over and over until rage swallows her pain. She manages to turn on the elevator and the fucker has the gall to try and come for her again. She kicks and punches and bites and when she pins him in between the floors, when he is sliced in half, crushed by the elevator? She records him dying so she can watch it again and spits on his still warm carcass.

She was outside at last, pausing for a second to let freezing rain fall on her face. Something whistles through the air and as a lightning strike illuminates the neglected garden she catches a glimpse of black fog. Right, not safe here. She lifted the camera again and began the muddy trek through the garden to the wall she’d seen in the flash only to find it she couldn’t have climbed it on a good day, with the rain and the missing fingers and the overwhelming exhaustion she didn’t stand a chance. After looping around and almost falling off rain slick roofs she came to the shed Father Martin had told her to go to. Slipping inside and hiding another battery in her jacket pocket she moved to pry open the old rickety door at the back of it. When it popped open there was-  
There was  
There was something looking back. An inhuman spectre was staring at her with blank eyes. At her hesitant step backwards it moved forward like physics didn’t bind it. She moved to run and it rushed through her like a winter wind cutting to the bone. She kept shivering as she pushed onwards into the black.

Back inside to try and find a way out, Father Martin was calling from on high. During her first tentative explorations of this new place, while she ran from another murderous naked man the goddamn floor broke. As she scrabbled for a hold her camera slid and fell and slipped through another broken floor into blackness. Right then, find a way down. She stumbled blind and picked up a heavy pocket full of batteries clinking like death. After scraping her knees and her hands beginning to bleed again she finally saw something in the inky black, a glint of beautiful light from her camera. Eagerly she reached up and flicked the night vision on to see the room she was in, pressing it to her eye. The first thing she noticed was a cobweb crack in the glass. The second thing was the glowing eyes staring right at her. She marked a clear path to the door and set off in a thudding sprint as shrieking variants ran after her, stopping once she reached light.  
Navigate the warren, find the spark plugs and the key, open the lock and maybe just maybe she’d be fucking free.  
Nope.  
Father Martin was in the room but that was a cross he was nailed to with kindling all around it. He was babbling about life and prophets and how she must bare witness and all too quickly he ushered one of his flock over to set the pyre ablaze. Clara had been filming the whole time but she centred herself and stared down the wailing man until his screams stopped before she let herself leave the burning chapel, the least she could do for a man who if not a friend had been a rare ally in this hell. He’d open the elevator to the front doors it turned out and she was so close. So close she could feel a wind from the open door through the metal gate, she could see the fading clouds, she could- she could see the floor rising and the elevator clunked and slid and she caught her last beautiful glimpse of the night before being plunged into the guts of mount massive once more.

The walls where white, like the throat of an iceberg. It was also cold as one down here too, her shoes neatly clicking until she walked through a sticky puddle of viscera, then for a short while thereafter they’d make a tacky noise as it left fading footsteps. Carefully she picked her way across the sterile office broken up by blots of bodies and red. At the end of the corridor there was a door bordered by lights and alarms evidently as they all started flashing and blaring and something smokey was taking shape. Hesitantly she lifted her camera and upon seeing nothing, flicked it to night vision. That was the ghost from earlier and oh he sounded furious and he was heading for her and filled with a fear she couldn’t name she ran like she wasn’t bleeding and exhausted and hadn’t been racing around this place all night. She slid over waxy blue pallets and darted around tipped crash carts until she came to a set of double doors, throwing them open.  
Chris “the piggy man” Walker was holding her aloft by the neck as she snarled and clawed chunks of skin out of his arm. He threw her and this time the ice cold cement knocked every last breath of air clean from her lungs. He slowly advanced on her with a typical threat of little pig, irritating chains clinking before he was thrown into the wall, tossed like he weighed nothing. Scrambling for oxygen and camera she lifted it, shaking, flicking the night vision on and off as Chris was demolished before her. The spectre was killing him, a wiry insubstantial thing was beating him to death. Instead of letting internal bleeding do its work, the ghost pulled him through the air vent, shredding him to a fine pulp.  
Walking slowly almost shaken away she came across a man in a wheelchair who told her of old German myths made metal from flesh and the man she must murder to escape. She dodged through stinking golden rooms filled with green gas and leapt over chasms and it was all fine until the ghost- the Walrider, the swarm the thing in the dark and Father Martin’s accursed god caught her as she made another leap of faith on to rickety scaffolding and hurled her to the ground far below. On one hand she could barely breath again but on the other she had dropped right by the final killswitch, she slammed her now numb hand down on it and took another video of someone dying, this time blood was slowly filling Billy’s orb, leaking from every orifice. The shriek of the Walrider hit after he did, throwing Clara clean across the room and knocking her camera down by the newest corpse in the facility, facing towards the two of them. He slammed her into a tank so hard her ribs cracked along with the glass dome. They hurled into the air and if she thought she knew pain, that she knew cold she was wrong. Something slid into her ribs as the Walrider vaporized and she didn’t want to think of it as she plummeted to the ground.  
Wake up.  
Grab your camera.  
Hobble out of here don’t pass out just keep moving almost at the door the whistling is in your head. The door swung open and men in body armour pointed heavy rifles at her. In the instant before the first bullet hit, space between the muzzle flare and more pain she was furious.  
Then she was dying.  
She slowly blinked as she bled out on the floor, abdomen hurting less than that cold from before. She thought it was her last moment alive when she heard the screaming, something about being the host, gunfire and bodies hitting the ground. This time she let herself sleep, nothing could hurt her here anymore.


End file.
